What David Fowler did for Anglo-German relations

More than 30 years ago, before the Warwick students had their Union building, they held a disco every Friday night in the East Site refectory, immediately adjacent to the Maths Houses. At that time, the distinguished German Professor Helmut Wielandt arrived for 6 weeks to take part in an Algebra Symposium. He stayed with his wife in House No. 6, just a few yards from the refectory. Wielandt was both revered and feared, for his fastidiousness and unwillingness to compromise were legendary. (Once in Cambridge his hosts were 30 minutes late for a dinner engagement and he refused to dine with them.) After the Wielandts’ first weekend here, I arrived at the Institute on the Monday morning to hear from a colleague that we had a problem. Wielandt had suffered a sleepless Friday night. He had put on his slippers and a coat over his pyjamas, entered the refectory unobserved, traced the speaker cables to the wall sockets and removed the plugs. Standing in the midst of the hundreds of rockers, suddenly frozen into inactivity, the Student President had apparently walked across to Wielandt, put his arm round his shoulders and said, “Now Grandpa, what can we do for you?”

On the Monday morning I went to Wielandt’s office expecting him to say that he was going straight back to Tübingen. But in fact he was in great form. He said, “Mr Fowler and Elaine have found the perfect solution to the problem. Each weekend starting on Friday, for the next 5 weeks, Mrs Wielandt and I will make trips to the Cathedral cities (Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Lichfield and Oxford) - and this can be paid for out of research funds”.

Wielandt came back to Warwick many times.

Stewart Stonehewer